p of
the rampart, catching up a cry which now sounded everywhere in the
darkness. "Forty-third to the right--fifty-second to the left!"
I turned sharply to the left and ran from him.

A rush of men overtook me. "This way!" they shouted, swerving aside
from the line of the ramparts and sliding down the steep inner slope
towards the town. They were mad for loot, but in my ignorance I
supposed them to be obeying orders, and I turned aside and clambered
down after them.

We crossed a roadway and plunged into a dark and deserted street at
the foot of which shone a solitary lamp. Then I learned what my
comrades were after. The first door they came to they broke down
with their musket-butts. An old man was crouching behind it; and,
dragging him out, they tossed him from one to another, jabbing at him
with their bayonets. I ran on, shutting my ears to his screams.

I was alone now; and, as it seemed, in a forsaken town. Here and
there a light shone beneath a house-door or through the chinks of a
shutter. I _felt_ that behind the windows I passed Ciudad Rodrigo
was awake and waiting for its punishment. Behind me, along the
ramparts, the uproar still continued. But the town, here and for the
moment, I had to myself: and it was waiting, trembling to know what
my revenge would be.

I came next to a small open square; and was crossing it, when in the
corner on my right a door opened softly, showing a lit passage
within, and a moment later was as softly shut. Scarcely heeding, I
ran on; my feet sounding sharply on the frozen cobbles. And with
that a jet of light leapt from under the door-sill across the narrow
pavement, almost between my legs: and I pitched headlong, with a
shattered foot.

Doubtless I fainted with the pain: for it could not have been--as it
seemed--only a minute later that I opened my eyes to find the square
crowded and bright with the glare of two burning houses. A herd of
bellowing oxen came charging past the gutter where I lay, pricked on
by a score of redcoats yelling in sheer drunkenness as they
flourished their bayonets. Two or three of them wore monks' robes
flung over their uniforms, and danced idiotically, holding their
skirts wide. I supposed it had been raining, for a flood ran through
the gutter and over my broken ankle. In the light of the
conflagration it showed pitch black, and by and by I knew it for wine
flowing down from a whole cellarful of casks which a score of madmen
we